The entrance to the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. The university has attracted three expat professors from Yale as a result of the political turmoil in the U.S.Nathan Denette/The Associated Press
Yale professors who left the school and accepted positions at the University of Toronto are speaking out about the Trump administration’s attacks on post-secondary institutions, expressing their fears about authoritarianism rising south of the border.
Three Yale professors – all of them vocal critics of President Donald Trump – have recently taken up roles at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.
Earlier this week, philosophy professor Jason Stanley, who has written about fascism and propaganda, announced that he would leave Yale for U of T.
He joins professors Marci Shore and Timothy Snyder, who specialize in Eastern European history. The two academics are married and arrived in Canada last August, on a sabbatical from Yale. Mr. Trump’s re-election in November factored heavily into the decision to stay in Canada, according to Prof. Shore.
“There’s a state of dazed horror following the election. After we calmed down and started to think it through, I clearly didn’t want to go back,” said Prof. Shore, who expressed guilt about leaving the United States, but decided she didn’t want to take their children back there.
Prof. Snyder has written extensively on tyranny. In January, U.S. Vice-President JD Vance tweeted that he was an “embarrassment” to Yale after the professor criticized the nomination of Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense.
Prof. Shore wrote the 2018 book Ukrainian Night about the 2014 revolution. The couple’s friends and colleagues protested in the Maidan; a student of her husband’s was killed by snipers, she said. Less than two years later, when Mr. Trump won his first election, Prof. Shore felt “an immediate sense of terror.”
As Trump cuts university research, American scholars look north
“As a historian of the 1930s, of totalitarianism … of this unhinging from empirical reality that happened in Russia, I was able to see certain things sooner in my own country than I would have otherwise been able to see,” she said.
“With Trump on the rise, you could feel the potential for civil war, for more mass scale violence, for the brutal deportations you’re seeing now, the idea that there’s an enemies list. I’m a historian of totalitarianism. I know where an enemies list could go.”
The Trump administration has put higher learning in its crosshairs.
On March 8, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student, for his role in pro-Palestinian protests, with the Trump administration seeking to deport the permanent resident. The school has acquiesced to external supervision over its Middle East studies department.
Earlier this week, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student from Turkey, was detained by masked, plainclothes agents in Somerville, Mass., after co-authoring an op-ed in the school paper calling on the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel.
And on Thursday, the University of Michigan announced it would suspend its diversity and inclusion program, after an executive order by Mr. Trump banned the initiatives.
Prof. Shore doesn’t believe American universities are prepared to protect their faculty or their students.
“I don’t see thus far that universities have managed to hold up or to band together,” she said. “I see this descent into a reign of terror where people get scared, they don’t want to be targeted themselves, so they put their heads down and it begins to spiral.”
At the Munk School, Prof. Shore is chair in European intellectual history; Prof. Snyder chair in modern European history. They will begin teaching in September, with both positions supported by the Temerty Endowment for Ukrainian Studies.
Prof. Stanley, who becomes a professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and at the Department of Philosophy, said he never expected to leave Yale. But after a recruiting process spanning more than a year, he decided last week he had to in response to what he sees as a country facing the threat of an authoritarian takeover by the U.S. government. Prof. Stanley is the author of several works on fascism, including the 2024 book Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.
The final straw was the capitulation, as he saw it, of the Columbia University administration to demands from the U.S. government. The Trump administration had threatened to revoke hundreds of millions in federal funding from Columbia, and the school responded with several measures designed to satisfy its demands, Prof. Stanley said.
“We’ve been monitoring the political situation here, and the window was going to close. And there are a lot of people who are going to want to come to the University of Toronto,” said Prof. Stanley, who felt he couldn’t delay any longer.
“It could be that the great [American] universities will be able to figure a way out of this. Then maybe I will have made a mistake. But if you wait until you know you’re not making a mistake, it’s too late.”
University leaders have found considerable interest from scholars and graduate students in the U.S. looking to come north.
Janice Stein, the Munk School’s founding director, said it was critical for the school to deepen its work on authoritarianism and democracy as the United States proceeds “on a path that is deeply worrying.”
“It is very troubling to see universities individually targeted, students harassed, arrested, deported, detained,” Dr. Stein said.
“Universities are the early target. Universities, courts – that’s the playbook. And unfortunately that’s what we’re seeing unfolding.”